Episode 59. Iraq & the US Dip-Mil Partnership: Transitioning to Counterinsurgency and Bushels of Iranian Pistachios with General George Casey and Ambassador John Negroponte

Episode Transcript:

Amb. McCarthy: [00:00:00] From the American Academy of Diplomacy, this is The General and the Ambassador. Our podcast brings together senior us diplomats and senior US military leaders, in conversations about their partnership during a major international crisis or a challenge to US national security. My name is Ambassador Debra McCarthy, and I'm the producer and host. The General and the Ambassador is a production of the American Academy of Diplomacy in partnership with UNC Global at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Today we will discuss U involvement in Iraq and lessons learned our guests are General George Casey and Ambassador John Negroponte. They served together in Iraq in 2004 and 2005, when General Casey was the Commander of Multinational Forces Iraq and Ambassador Negroponte was the first US Ambassador after the Iraq war. General Casey served for 41 years in the US Army. He had many leadership positions, including as Chief of Staff for the  US Army and Commanded of the First Armored Division. He also deployed as part of Operation Joint Endeavor to Bosnia and Herzegovina . Currently, among his many activities, he is the Distinguished Senior Lecturer of Leadership at the Samuel Johnson College of Business at Cornell. Ambassador Negroponte served in senior government positions over a 44 year career, including as Ambassador to Honduras, to Mexico, to the Philippines and to the United Nations. He also served as the first Director of National Intelligence and as Deputy Secretary of State. He is currently a Senior Fellow at Yale University' Jackson Institute. General Casey, Ambassador Negroponte, thank you so much for joining our podcast, The General and the Ambassador. I know you have very busy schedules with all your activities, and I truly appreciate you taking the time to join us. I wanted to start with the following: you both arrived in Iraq in June, 2004, 18 months after the US invasion, which overthrew Saddam Hussein. Your arrival coincided with the official transfer of power from the US led Coalition Provisional Authority to the Interim Iraqi Government. Can you each describe the country you found when you arrived?

Amb. Negroponte: [00:02:24] The country I found when I arrived, you know, compared to the eight other foreign postings I've had, I always found Iraq, under those circumstances of warfare and occupation, to be very enigmatic and very hard to get a feeling for. And it was one of the dissatisfactions I felt I had throughout my time there. I think the main thing I feel that I found was its institutions had been destroyed its critical institutions: the army, the police, and so forth. And the government had no resources of its own. And the army was sort of a de minimus army. I guess my first impression is boy, there's a lot of work to be done here.

Gen. Casey: [00:03:12] It's kind of funny, I think, the way that we went in, because I wasn't confirmed until the 26th of June. And since my wedding anniversary was the 27th, I decided to spend my anniversary with my wife. I was literally getting dressed to get on the plane, to go to the Middle East, when John called from Amman, Jordan, where he had pre-positioned himself and said, "Bremer's gone, I'm going in." and I had already planned to go through Qatar to see Central Command headquarters, and Kuwait to see the Army headquarters, supporting headquarters there. So I decided to continue that. So John was there for a couple of days without me .

Amb. Negroponte: [00:03:45] Well, and that's, of course, because Bremer left earlier than originally planned. I think they got a bit spooked by the security picture and they just didn't want to leave on a predictable day.

Gen. Casey: [00:03:56] The thing that surprised me most, really were two things. One was the infrastructure and more of the lack of infrastructure. I had assumed that Iraq was much more developed in terms of things like electricity and sewage. It was deplorable some of the places that we saw in Baghdad, especially, and how far they had to go. The other thing that really struck me was just the lack of governance experience among the leaders. I should have expected for it to be at, at as low a level as it was, because these were primarily people who had been an exile for awhile and they had no governing experience. In some of those early meetings, we called it pretending to govern, that people were having these national security meetings and just kind of going through the motions, but no real substance. And unfortunately, because of the three elections and three changes  in government and the first two years, just as they were starting to get to the point where they were being able to make an impact, they left. That was really difficult.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:04:55] John, I wanted to ask you, the US Embassy in Baghdad, when you arrived, was located in one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces, a permanent embassy was not opened until 2009. What were the working and living conditions of US diplomats at the time?

Amb. Negroponte: [00:05:12] Well, I'd say the working conditions were pretty good. The palace had been where the Provisional Authority had operated from. So by the time we got there, pretty much fixed up to work in. By the time we got there, that was okay. And also I should add that General Casey  had two offices, he had one at his headquarters, his military command, but he also had an office right opposite mine in the palace, which was, I think a very important notion and very good idea. So I'd say the working conditions were fine. We had communications, we had this and that getting beyond the Green  was a challenge for the employees. But with precautions, they could go out. They could go out with armored cars, maybe a light security escort wearing their flak jackets and their helmets and so forth. But security was obviously a challenge, I think the entire time that I was there and it probably continued well beyond. The actual living conditions  not so hot for most of the diplomats. And if you think of them normally as living sort of in standard housing around the world, whether it's small apartments or small houses, they all lived in trailers. Usually doubled up two people each to a trailer. I think I was the only person, not even my deputy had a house, I was the only employee of the embassy who had a house. So that part of the living was by normal standards, a little bit rough, but the trailers were perfectly comfortable and adequately provided with heat and running water and everything else. And I suppose a lot of people just got used to it. 

Amb. McCarthy: [00:06:44] And that was part of the deployment for the diplomats.

Amb. Negroponte: [00:06:47] Well it was no surprise.

Gen. Casey: [00:06:48] They jokingly called themselves trailer trash. The other thing that I would say about the working conditions is, when we wanted to coordinate something with the embassy, it was a combat operation, because you had to get a patrol put together to drive down to the embassy or vice versa. John and I said, well, if we're going to have the level of coordination that we need for the political and the economic and everything with the military, we need to do more to combine the military headquarters with the embassy. So to his credit, John accepted about 200 guys and gals with guns into the embassy for our political military section and for our assessment section and for our strategic operations section. And they operated right there in the embassy with the Foreign Service officers.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:07:32] Well, I want to get to this issue of this jointness and that joint mission plan. In 2004, the US shifted its focus in Iraq from military occupation to post-conflict reconstruction. You started your own process before you arrived of meeting to develop a joint mission plan. What kind of guideposts did you use to develop this plan? And how did you go about getting buy-in from those around and above you?

Gen. Casey: [00:08:01] I think it was probably the day after I was nominated, John called me up and said, "Hi, I'm John Negroponte. I've been just confirmed as the first Ambassador to Iraq after the war. Let's get together." And so .He came over to my office in the Pentagon the next day, and we sat down and we started talking about what we thought we might do. For me, the three documents that we use to frame what it is we were going to do, there was a national security planning directive from the president that basically laid out the division of labor between State and Defense. And John was responsible for everything except for security, and that's what I was responsible for. Then the President made a speech in the Army War College mid-May and he laid out what he wanted to accomplish in Iraq. We never got a written document saying, this is what we want you to do in Iraq. There was the speech. And then lastly, and I think probably most influential, was the UN Security Council Resolution with the two attached letters from Colin Powell and from Ayad Allawi the Prime Minister of Iraq. And we kind of took all of those three things over a period of, I think maybe two or three meetings, we kind of roughed out a vision statement saying, this is what we think we're going to accomplish in Iraq. And then we gave ourselves 30 days on the ground to kind of make sure that our perceptions from Washington were right. And I had been told by Secretary Rumsfeld that the president wanted us to come back in 30 days. And so in 30 days we briefed the plan to the President and he approved it, and my recollection is, with one addition and he added the words, "an ally in the war on terror" to our mission statement. So that's basically how I saw it. And once he approved it, that's what we executed.

Amb. Negroponte: [00:09:38] In a way it's like, you know how they say in the diplomatic service, you get to write your own instructions. Well, that sort of happened to me. I was sitting in New York negotiating these Security Council Resolutions that were laying out a political roadmap for Iraq. And basically that's what we carried out on the political side of things. And they were  encrusted and embodied in these UN Security Council Resolutions. So they had the imprimatur of the entire Security Council. So we had quite a bit to work with, I'd say, you know, on that score. I think the key, or at least one of the key points, I'd be interested if George agrees with me, of this whole joint exercise was simply the discipline of ensuring that on each side, the military on one side and the civilians on the other, made a point of constantly thinking about what their counterparty was doing and how we had to coordinate and mesh our efforts and not go off in different directions. I think we certainly managed to do that. And we had very good people on the ground helping us flesh this plan out.

Gen. Casey: [00:10:49] I agree with that, that national security planning directive, the good news was that it articulated a clear division of labor. The bad news was John and I had to create the unity of effort between the embassy and the multinational force so that we all worked together to accomplish the objectives of the United States. And for me, I needed the political effects and the economic effects to cement the results of my security operations. So frankly, the keys to my success were outside of my control and I needed to work with John and with the Prime Minister of Iraq to get the political and economic support for the military operations. It was key that we work together.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:11:28] When you got there on the ground, was it difficult to transition from occupation to reconstruction, with the teams that you found there?

Amb. Negroponte: [00:11:37] Therein lies a huge issue that you're raising, by the phrasiology you used. I think one of the problems of our predecessors was that they thought they were in a period of reconstruction. When in fact, we had an ongoing guerrilla war and you remember Saddam dissolved a lot of his Republican Guard and stuff like that. And they went out and hid amongst the population. And they were at the root of a lot of these problems, but we weren't ready for reconstruction yet. I mean, the best testimony to that is every time you built or rebuilt a telephone or an electric tower, The next night, it would be blown up. And actually George had on his staff  a really nice Australian general, General Molan, who  had a small team whose only job was to go and repair the next day and arrange for the repair of infrastructure that had been damaged overnight by various types of terrorist activity. And it was like  Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill. It was just  endless. I think the leadership of the Coalition Provisional Authority did not properly appreciate the situation Iraq was in and we weren't ready for reconstruction yet.

Gen. Casey: [00:12:51] From the military perspective, it was a tough transition that frankly took the entire time I was there, and some after that, to make the change in mindset from conventional war to prosecuting a counterinsurgency operation. Every time that a new unit came in, they came in at a slightly higher level and they left where they should've been. And it really wasn't until I went back to Iraq as the Army Chief, after I'd left Iraq, and I saw the units coming in now at an inappropriate level. So for us in the military, transitioning from a conventional war mindset, which is what we had going in there, to effectively prosecuting counterinsurgency operations was a long transition.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:13:32] And there was a huge program for relief and reconstruction at the same time, roughly $17 billion worth. Where did this money come from? And what were the priorities that you had to shift on that funding?

Amb. Negroponte: [00:13:45] That was the $17 billion that President Bush sought and received from the Congress for the reconstruction of Iraq. And I think in his mind it was a one-shot deal. I mean, he wasn't going to go and give $17 billion every year or something like that to Iraq. This was a big dose, which he thought should do the trick. Ambassador Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority started implementing that plan. When I was sent out, General Powell asked me to review that program and review its priorities and whether we thought they were right. We took a month to do that. Ambassador William Taylor, of Ukraine fame, and a West Point graduate, by the way, was our counselor for reconstruction. He managed that and he came up with various recommendations to reprogram certain amounts of money. And luckily, not that much had been spent yet. And so we did some pretty serious reprogramming, our recommendation, Washington approved it, and then we did it. But the main one was there had been nothing allocated to Iraqi security forces. We managed to get something like $2 billion allocated to the security forces. And then later on the Pentagon started coming up with its own funds for the Iraqi forces. But at that time, this was a critical source of support because that had not yet been thought through back in Washington.

Gen. Casey: [00:15:13] I would just point out that offering that $2 billion out of that fund was John's initiative to me. I remember when you walked in and said, how would you like $2 billion? I said, thank you very much.

Amb. Negroponte: [00:15:23] Well, that was the Vietnam experience, George, the experience of Vietnamization and how it started too late. And how Westmoreland didn't believe it. Because he basically wanted the Americans to do all the fighting. He didn't quite say it so simplistically, but that was the objective consequence of his behavior. And it was General Creighton Abrams, who was the great advocate of Vietnamization, but it was sort of a day late and a dollar short in terms of American patience with what we were doing out there in Vietnam. So I felt we ought to avoid repeating that mistake.

Gen. Casey: [00:15:58] And I was very much with you, on the military side, I was not going to put us in a position where we were going to do most of the fighting for the duration. And that's why we went with the transition plan fairly early on in the process.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:16:11] Well, I did want to get into this security side of the use of funding. Some listeners may or may not know the Iraqi army was disbanded under the Coalition Provisional Authority, but for the country to be stable, it obviously needed an armed forces and it needed a police force. So what were the consequences of disbanding the army, and then separately, how did you go about rebuilding and building a police force, also essential for security?

Gen. Casey: [00:16:39] Disbanding the army meant we basically had to start from scratch. And that was unfortunate because I didn't think that needed to happen. And I was involved in some of the post-war planning when I was on the Joint Staff and we, we had hoped to tell the army to "go back to your barracks. If you're in your barracks, you stay there, you won't be harmed." and then we would reingtegrate them. When the police, the police development was under the control of the embassy, which it normally is, which is fine for the local place, but they had these national police that were basically military units. We started having more of a role in training them. And ultimately, I think it was probably not until October, 2005, that John's successor, Zalmay Khalilzad said, okay, just put the whole police training bit under the military.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:17:25] Traditionally police training is done, as you said, General, by the State Department. I used to work in the bureau, INL, that did the training, but it was community policing. It was not training a national police to fight insurgents..

Gen. Casey: [00:17:39] Yeah, that was one of the challenges that we had when we first got there, looking at what the Coalition Provisional Authority had laid out as a strategy. They were training the police as community police. And then that was clearly not what they needed. And so we had to adapt the training.

Amb. Negroponte: [00:17:54] Not what they needed or not sufficient, George? I mean, you probably could use some of it, but it wasn't the primary thing. 

Gen. Casey: [00:18:01] For me, it was both. They needed to defend themselves with significant weapons.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:18:05] In this process of reconstruction, what funds did the Iraqis have? Because for years, their funds from their oil revenues had been managed by the UN. And when was this turned back over?

Amb. Negroponte: [00:18:18] This is a weird one because a lot of US military in Iraq thought that this walking around money that they had was funded by Iraqi money that had been held in escrow during the whole Saddam era. There was several billions of dollars in the federal reserve bank of New York, which when Iraq was under embargo, the oil revenues would simply go straight to that account and held in escrow. And then it was released, piece by piece, bit by bit, on exceptional circumstances under the so-called Oil for Food Program, but mainly to pay for humanitarian needs, medicine, food, et cetera. And the rest was just held there. That money started being made available to US commanders during the occupation. And not long after we got there, I can't remember exactly when, but once Iraq became sovereign, that money was turned back to the government.

Gen. Casey: [00:19:18] What we did need to do was to make sure that the development process that Bill Taylor was running was synchronized with the commanders in the different regions around Iraq, the military commanders, and I, and shortly after we got there, John allowed me to sit down with all those folks and I had all of my brigade commanders come in there and I said, okay, we're not walking out of this room until everybody knows what projects are in whose area. Up to that point, there wasn't any coordination and the military folks couldn't provide security and they couldn't leverage the benefits of the projects with the local population, because they didn't know what was going on. It was an integration issue more than anything else that we got on top of fairly early 

Amb. McCarthy: [00:19:55] Well, we've done a podcast on how USAID worked in the country. And one of the things that stands out is the timeline of the development experts is different from the timeline of others, and including our military colleagues. Did you find that that was an issue that one wanted to do things more rapidly than the other?

Gen. Casey: [00:20:14] Well, I mean the military guys always want to get there, but pace really wasn't the issue. It was the integration so that we could both leverage what the other one was delivering. And that's what we tried to sort out, aside from the normal military desire to get everything done as quickly as possible , I didn't think pace was the issue.

Amb. Negroponte: [00:20:34] I agree with you on that, George, and I also think that the other issue, which we alluded to earlier about whether they were really ready for reconstruction, it seems to me, locally tailored modest sized programs that don't lend themselves to somebody immediately wanting to go and bomb them is probably a better type of project than some visible target. All you're doing is creating a target, if you do some large infrastructure projects, and you haven't brought the violence under control. Taylor was an ideal person for this, and the military had a huge amount of experience because frankly, with the occupation and the lack of governmental capacity on the Iraqi side, our military were really running a lot of these towns and villages, frankly. In many instances doing it from the seat of their pants and not doing a bad job at all, but they had to improvise an awful lot. I mean, give you one example, just sort of amusing, the governor of Diyala province, George, you remember, which was always a very difficult province, very hardcore Sunni, extremist, et cetera. The governor was a Cockney- accented Iraqi who had come back just before the war to visit his mother. He got caught in the war that was going on, for lack of any better available choice. He was asked to be come the governor of the province, this guy. And he was a tooth implants doctor. That was his profession. I'm not kidding you. Yeah, we recruited just about anyone and everybody to do these jobs because it's the same problem as the disbanding of the army. All top ranking career officials had gotten the boot. They weren't there anymore. So it was hard to find experienced people to work with. Frankly, we're lucky we found anybody at all.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:22:27] Well, I wanted to get back to the issue of the level of violence in the country in the time that you were together. I mean, there were a number of incidents, including the killing of four contractors in Fallujah with pictures of their bodies being dragged and burned causing outrage in the States. And we have the first and second battles of Fallujah that took place. Can you describe for our listeners a bit, the panoply of the insurgents that were in the country?

Gen. Casey: [00:22:54] It was a fairly confusing situation, when it came to the enemy. We had a chart that we called the Wonderbread chart because it had all the different colors for the different groups. But you basically had, the primary enemy we faced when John and I were there, were the Sunni Arab, what we call the Sunni Arab rejectionists.. Those people who were members of the Saddam Hussein regime, who were now out of power and had decided that that was not going to be a permanent situation. And then on the other side, we had the Shia extremists, and then we had the Islamic extremists from across the Middle East. And then we had common criminals that Saddam Hussein had released just as the war was going on. And everybody wore the same clothes. And, and it was an extremely confusing situation for our folks. You mentioned Fallujah, I think the first real battle where John and I integrated the civil military aspects of things was in Najaf, where within the first month of our arrival, we were thrust into a major battle across the Southern part of the country and the capital of Baghdad, because a young Marine who'd been on the ground less than a week, made a wrong turn and drove too close to a Shia militia leader's house. A gunfight broke out that quickly spread across the whole city of Najaf, and we wound up taking a month to reduce the city and boot Muqtada al-Sadr out. And there's a wonderful Cuban missile crisis type meeting in Allawi's garden with Jim Jeffrey and Ron Newman and me and the Iraqi Minister of Defense is calling up saying the Iraqi troops are ready, we are ready to go in. I say, "I promise you,  they are not ready." And then he called back an hour later and said, "we're ready now." So I finally, I had to send  the three-star commander down to Najaf, to look and come back and tell us, but we were up most of that night negotiating, and finally the Prime Minister got Muqtada al-Sadr to leave. They basically turned the mosque back over to the government.

Amb. Negroponte: [00:24:43] But a lot of people got killed. I remember that. A lot of his people.

Gen. Casey: [00:24:47] It was a very tough fight because while we were negotiating, we were continuing to do military operations to reduce the area outside the mosque.

Amb. Negroponte: [00:24:55] And then that Shia extremism manifested itself also in one of the neighborhoods of Baghdad.

called Sadr City. And I don't remember whether that coincided, George, or that came a little bit later.

Gen. Casey: [00:25:08] There was another rising in Sadr City during that time, but there were also several others beside that.

Amb. Negroponte: [00:25:13] Yeah, that was the same phenomenon. I mean, the difficult thing there is in both of those situations, in the battles, people were getting killed, who were part of this Shia majority. And I don't think that rank and file Shia in the country took umbrage , but it was still, it was delicate politically and Muqtada al-Sadr, well, of course, he's quite a powerful figure to this very day, politically in the country. And he has sort of a mixed record. But at that time it sort of looked like for awhile that the roof was falling in. You got Najaf, you got Sadr City. Were we going to be facing a steady diet of this? And I think that our military operation, George, was effective enough to reduce their appetite to start another fight of that kind.

Gen. Casey: [00:25:57] And you mentioned Fallujah, Deborah. That was another battle where John and I had to spend some number of months convincing Prime Minister Allawi that we needed to do this operation before the January elections, because they were basically using Fallujah as a car bomb factory to send car bombs into Baghdad. We had to convince the Prime Minister that if he didn't reduce this, the elections in Baghdad were in jeopardy. And it was a tough call for the Prime Minister because he's trying to bring the Sunni population into the elections and vote at the same time, he's attacking a major city.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:26:30] And these were elections for a national assembly. I mean the first election in the country. And I understand, George, that you effectively stopped all vehicular traffic for several days to prevent these car bombs, so people could go and conduct the elections. Can you talk a little bit about the significance of these elections?

Gen. Casey: [00:26:51] They were the first free and fair elections in Iraq, in right about 50 years. It was the first step in the UN timeline, and it was to elect a parliament that would draft a constitution. But that was again, another example of us, John and I, working closely with the Prime Minister to get him to approve these basically national travel restrictions. We didn't want to give them an extended amount of time to kind of plan to go around the measures that we put in. And we really just dropped it on him on the last day. I still remember to this day, they needed my helicopter, so I flew down first thing in the morning and I spent the morning in my office. I'm watching BBC and they have the camera at what turned out to be the Green Zone polling booth and no one's coming, no one was coming to vote. Allawi comes in and then Ghazi al-Yawer  comes in. I'm sitting there going, "Oh my God, nobody's voting". We had a 10 o'clock meeting by video teleconference and all the commanders were reporting in. And I'll never forget this, Pete Corelli reports, he's got the Baghdad area and he reports hundreds of people walking in from Abu Ghraib to Baghdad to vote. And we go on with the other reports from around the country and he breaks back in and says, "Excuse me, it's not hundreds of people walking in. It's thousands." And that's when I knew we were going to be okay, but I didn't, it was about 10:30 by the time we figured that out.

Amb. Negroponte: [00:28:08] It was tense. I was just looking at some notes I had made to myself the night before, you know, I think we were all very apprehensive. We weren't certain how it was going to turn out. One thing that maybe worth mentioning is, George, as we talk about, initially it was these disgruntled Saddamists and so forth, but as those months evolved while we were there, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who eventually became the head of Al-Qaeda in Iraq was the one who started to gain strength. And he is the one who took control of the situation inside of Fallujah, and that permitted the convening of various kinds of Sharia courts and executions and very ruthless Al-Qaida type rule of Fallujah. So the situation inside of Fallujah itself was becoming really desperate. That was another reason for having to go in. Not to mention, I think the key point, which is how can a sovereign nation have an election and not assert control over its entire territory?

Amb. McCarthy: [00:29:16] Well, you both traveled extensively throughout the country. John, you noted in, I read your entire oral history, you tried to go out every day to meet Iraqi officials, politicians, business, people, and you opened up some branch offices of the embassy in the country.

Amb. Negroponte: [00:29:32] I opened them all. Yes.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:29:33] Can you give our listeners a flavor of the importance and the challenges of doing outreach during conflict?

Amb. Negroponte: [00:29:42] It's very hard and security, I mean, if you're not military and you're not used to that kind of situation, and you're not used to carrying a gun and all those things, it's very difficult, but I've got to hand it to the civilian employees of the embassy. They accepted the work in stride. They did not balk. They did not object to going out into the field, going outside the Green Zone to the Red Zone, taking due precautions, of course. My experience with these issues, and I, this is a little bit more of a generalization about the State Department and the Foreign Service generally, is that it's usually not the officers themselves, the reporting officers and others who are that concerned about their security. It's our security officers. You know, they're not happy unless you're locked up in your own room and they know that they have you safely parked there for the foreseeable future. If you're going to act that way and you're going to have everybody on lockdown all the time, what's the purpose of having the people out there? There's a risk management proposition here that always challenging, but I think that most of us favored erring a bit on the side of taking some risks.

Gen. Casey: [00:30:52] I tried to get out three or four times a week and really go across the country. Between John and I, we had a very good view of what was going on around the totality of the country. A lot of people did their reports from the Green Zone and that wasn't the whole country. Obviously it was a little bit easier for me, even though I would tell these division commanders that I didn't need a big security detachment. I remember having to make a U-turn in Baghdad. And as I turned around, I saw this  convoy, probably of 10 more Humvees behind me and Apache helicopters over my head. And I said, come on, give me a break . I think both of us having the ability to get out and see things and talk to people really gave us a very good feel of what was going on in the whole country. And that was critically important because nobody else had that view

Amb. Negroponte: [00:31:38] Probably the most pleasant evenings I spent in Iraq, were at George's quarters in the military headquarters. And he had a terrace that looked out on a lake that I'm sure Saddam had once had something to do with, and probably stocked it with carp and everything else.

Gen. Casey: [00:32:00] It was his hunting lodge.

Amb. Negroponte: [00:32:01] What we used to do out on his terrace and went very often, especially when General Abizaid would come to visit from the Middle Eastern command, was we would get a bushel of pistachio nuts. I don't know whether they were imported from Iran or what, but I can tell you, we helped raise the price of pistachios in the Middle East with those meetings of ours. But I can remember sort of popping the shells into the lake as we finished eating them. I mean, one thing in my experience in war kind of situations, like Vietnam or Iraq, is you do get to spend quite a bit of time talking with your colleagues. Not much else to do once you're, you know, out of your office. We talked a lot and pistachios helped us along.

Gen. Casey: [00:32:46] The Iraqis all knew that I liked pistachios, so every time one of them went to Iran, they'd bring back...

Amb. Negroponte: [00:32:50] They really did come from Iran.Well that's good.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:32:55] Well, after you left Iraq, you each transitioned into roles that were shaped by that country. John, you became the first Director of National Intelligence and George, you became the Chief of Staff of the Army. What lessons learned from your time on the ground in Iraq did you bring to these leadership positions?

Amb. Negroponte: [00:33:14] My basic view about a situation like Iraq is how hard it is to properly assess what is going on. I guess that's the political reporting officer in me. You know, how do I really know what's going on and how well do I understand the overall situation? And, and I think Iraq was very challenging in that regard. So when I get back to Washington and I find all these armchair geniuses who all have professed to understand what was going on 8,000 miles away, uh, you know, I'm not so sure. I'm not so sure. So I, my conclusion from that is what you gotta do is get a good commander out there and a good ambassador. And you, then you gotta place some trust in them because it's just not that easy, certainly sitting on the banks of the Potomac, to figure out what's going on in the banks of the Tigris river, really.

Gen. Casey: [00:34:07] The old axiom, the further away you get, the easier it looks.

Amb. Negroponte: [00:34:11] Yeah, that's right. Well, we also talked, Deborah, about the proverbial 8,000 mile screwdriver, when Washington is trying to micromanage everything that's happening on the ground and it's not easy.

Gen. Casey: [00:34:24] This was after you left John, but in the middle of 2006, I think, I got a list of 50 questions from the National Security Council to answer. Zal (Khalilzad) and  I did. But Deborah,  back to your original question here about what did I take away. For me, the big takeaway was that we in the Army needed to think more broadly than just the conventional war focus that I had grown up with for 30 years of a 40 year career. And so one of the first things I did was work with our training and doctrine command to revise our doctrine. And in 2008, we published the first doctrine since September 11th, 2001. That was critical for me to get us thinking in a different direction than just conventional war. The second thing I think that I really took away was the impact of this environment on people and in the combat environment. And so we started a program called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, where we tried to give the soldiers the skills that they needed to deal with these harsh environments that we were sending them in. Those were the two main things that I took away and tried to bring into the institution of the Army when I got back.

Amb. Negroponte: [00:35:29] In a way, Iraq was several different wars. Right? First it was a conventional aspect, that George talked about at first. Then there's this counterinsurgency. Probably the area where we got some of our most valuable experience as a government and as armed forces was in the area of counter-terrorism. I mean, I think some of the work that Stan McChrystal and his people did, in terms of being able to use all the different sources of military intelligence and in a real time way, be able to zero them in on an important target, like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, I think at the end of our Iraq involvement, that capacity was much greater than it was at the beginning of the century. And we proved it again later on when we got Osama bin Laden. Since terrorism was one of the main preoccupations post 9/11, I think we need to credit ourselves with having figured out much better how to capture or kill individual terrorists. I think that was an important accomplishment.

Gen. Casey: [00:36:34] It was a huge accomplishment, and really Osama bin Laden's death was built on what we were doing there in Iraq with Stan McChrystal and his folks. I remember that first summer we couldn't go into Fallujah. They had the whole city cordoned off. And I think there was, at that time, there were maybe two CIA predator drones in the country. I mean, we were having to duct tape position location devices onto the wings of these predators to track the terrorists. And we really built from there and built a significant capability that linked intelligence to targeting. And there's a significant difference in the level of intelligence required to target than there is to just asess. 

Amb. McCarthy: [00:37:18] Well to wrap up, I wanted to ask you, whether going forward, are there any aspects of the relationship between our diplomats and our military on the ground that should be incorporated, into legislation possibly, so we don't reinvent the process in the next crisis? 

Gen. Casey: [00:37:37] For the military, we've all had to deal with Goldwater Nichols. And for me, what I'm hearing, is do we need a Goldwater Nichols for the interagency? And Goldwater Nichols was the congressional act that forced the services to build a true joint capability.    Do we need something to cause the interagency to come together to do that? I don't know, but I think one of the positive things is, is you have an awful lot of young Foreign Service Officers who were out on the ground with the military. So you have military folks that are used to working with Foreign Service Officers and you have Foreign Service Officers that are used to working with the military, much like John and Dick Holbrook did in Vietnam. And they bring that experience with them as they progress through their foreign service careers.

Amb. Negroponte: [00:38:23] I didn't do it so much in my State Department jobs, Deborah, but when I was Director of National Intelligence, I mean, there's a lot of talk about trying to do a Goldwater Nichols kind of thing  for the 17 different intel agencies and so forth. Well, you always ought to be thinking of ways of broadening the experience of any individual employee. I mean, the Defense Department has the benefit of being an experienced large and now integrated organization. We, you know, it used to be the Army and the Army Air Force on the one hand, I mean, in the old days, whatever, the 19th century, we had a separate department, you know, Navy, et cetera. And now all of that is much better integrated. And I guess it took World War II to accomplish that really. I don't know whether you can apply those same concepts to much smaller civilian forces, but we certainly ought to be looking at ways, always, always, to expose each other to the various types of experience, AID officials, Foreign Service, State Department, Public Information Officers, so on and so forth.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:39:33] Well, I want to thank you both for sharing your experience, sharing your knowledge. You certainly created one heck of a team in Iraq and accomplished many things. And we very much appreciate on behalf of all the listeners, sharing this experience for both our military and our diplomatic colleagues. Thank you, gentlemen.

This has been a new episode in the series, The General and the Ambassador: a Conversation. Thank you for listening. Our series is a production of the American Academy of Diplomacy in partnership with UNC Global at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can find our podcasts on all major podcast sites and on our website, generalambassadorpodcast.org. Do follow us on Twitter and Facebook. And we welcome all input and suggestions. You can mail us directly at general.ambassador.podcast@gmail.com. Thank you for listening.